LATEST ADDITIONS

When you wish upon a star,
Makes no difference who you are;
Anything your heart desires,
Will come to you.—Jiminy Cricket

12-21-92-17-52-46. Big deal, another $100,000 lottery winner. Where's Jean-Phillipe? Probably off getting us something to drink. Who can blame him? I can't believe people sit around dreaming and waiting to hear all these winning numbers. J-P, you out there?

Young, good-looking, bright—J-P had a lot going for him. He certainly didn't need to sit here listening to winning lottery numbers. Ah, there you are. What are you mumbling about?

"12-21-92-17-52-46. I've won! I've won! I've won!" He shouted over and over, almost crushing me in a bear hug.

My oh my, J-P had really won a big one. And what was it he'd been dreaming about while buying all those tickets every payday for the last three years? Speakers! He'd wanted to own the best loudspeakers in the world, and now he could.

When a manufacturer sets out to design and build a product, be it in high-end audio or any other field, the final retail price is usually a prime consideration. Parts and assembly are only part of the equation; there also must be enough buyers to amortize the design and development costs. If the product is to be a flagship model—something a company hopes will give a lift to its entire line—engineers will sometimes throw caution to the winds, designing a product without thought to its ultimate price, which is only set after the design is complete. When Madrigal Audio Laboratories set out to design their No.30 Reference Digital Processor, they appear to have chosen exactly this approach.

Unique circumstances conspired to make the March 15 US debut of Raidho's handsome 2.1, 2.5-way floorstanding loudspeaker ($28,000/pair) at AudioVision San Francisco an unusual event. Despite ample planning on everyone's part, US Customs, which has never been known for putting audiophiles first, held up delivery of Raidho's new babies until the afternoon of the demo. Did they perhaps think that the "Raid" in Raidho was code for a terrorist plot?

Due to this unforeseeable snafu, what a very full house of eager audiophiles heard was not the Raidho 2.1 in all its glory, but a literally out-of-the-crate speaker whose drivers, capacitors, and circuits, by all accounts, had undergone only something like 5 hours of break-in. There was nothing that even Nordost's Lars Christensen, creator of the most masterfully conceived and executed audio demos I have ever witnessed, could do about the fact that the speaker could only provide an tantalizing albeit incomplete indication of its ultimate potential.

Divine Ricochet is a three-part music series made to accompany John Chamberlain: Choices, on view through May 13 at the Guggenheim Museum. The series takes its name from Chamberlain’s 1991 work, a large and colorful, mangled assortment of painted and chromium-plated steel.

So another SSI has come and gone. On the downside, the trade-only day was slow, a surprising number of SSI stalwarts—Legacy, Luxman, Vivid, Reference 3a, Ocellia, AvantGarde, and Antique Sound Lab among them—were missing in action, and the blue-wig thing is getting kind of old. On the up side, there was good traffic on the consumer days, the food and drink were great—even on-site at the Hilton—and the Coup de Foudre party was a blast (thank you, Graeme, Jennifer, et al). I was genuinely impressed by several new products, especially the Michael Tang tonearm, AudioQuest Dragonfly USB DAC, LM Audio 211IA integrated amp, Audio Note DD 4.1x CD player, and Naim NDS two-box network player. And, best of all, it was good to see some old friends, many for the first time since SSI 2011. It was a busy, fun time, a sort of a four-day moment, and I congratulate organizers Michel Plante and Sarah Tremblay for succeeding once again.

The Light Harmonic DaVinci USB is perhaps the most unusual-looking DAC I've seen, with the top of the unit that can be rotated. It's a non-upsampling, non-oversampling, no-negative-feedback design, with up to 384kHz/32-bit capability. The DaVinci uses three transformers in the power supply: one for digital, one for analog, and one for USB and control. This looks like a very serious design, and the price is correspondingly serious $20,000.

Gala-Solo is a Canadian speaker company that intends their products to be suitable for both the pro and audiophile markets, the "M" that's part of each speaker model's name standing for both "Monitor" and "Music." The M3 ($3600/pair) is a two-way, three-driver system, using pro drivers. The 6.5" bass drivers from PHL France feature a patented "intercooler" process. The tweeter, pictured above, from Acoustics Beyma (Spain), has an aluminum diaphragm and voice-coil. Rated sensitivity is 94dB, and the maximum level is 116dB. It was pointed out to me that this maximum level specification is particularly important: some speakers may produce 94dB for a 1W output, but, unlike the M3, they won't play much louder than that without distorting.